The Yue people are thought to have been Malayo-Polynesian rather than Mongoloid like the Xia Chinese. In northern China they were invariably deplored for their alien customs (e.g. banana leaves for plates) as much as for their steamy hillsides and malarial swamps. When the First Emperor extended his sway into the region, it was not a popular destination; only ‘fugitives, reprobates and shopkeepers’ were sent to settle there. Qin’s short-lived administration had been skeletal, and when the emperor died, it broke away. A Qin official, taking his cue from the melancholy Chen She’s uprising, had declared Nanyue an independent kingdom and himself its first king.
This was Zhao Tuo, otherwise King Wu of Nanyue. For ten years he was left in peace, Han Gaozu ‘having enough to do to take care of internal troubles’, according to Sima Qian. But in 196 BC the Han emperor sent a trusty troubleshooter, the Confucian ideologue Lu Jia, to talk King Wu into acknowledging Han supremacy. The king obliged in return for recognition of his assumed title, then reneged over a trade dispute. A Han embargo on iron sales, a strategic commodity since it was used for weapons, brought protests, followed by recrimination: King Wu declared himself an emperor, and troops sent south in 183 BC by the Dowager Empress Lü failed to quash this presumption. On the contrary, Nanyue’s troops began overrunning neighbouring territories. Their sovereign now rode in a carriage with a yellow canopy and issued his own ‘edicts’, both of these being imperial prerogatives.17
Sima Qian has Nanyue’s first king (and self-made emperor) dying in 137 BC. This seems unlikely; for if, as he says, King Wu was a magistrate under the First Emperor, he would have been at least a hundred and have outlasted two Qin and six Han emperors. More plausibly it was his successor, he whose jade suit now lies in the Guangzhou museum, who received the troubleshooting Lu Jia a second time and undertook to renounce the imperial style and send tribute to Chang’an. This was during Han Wendi’s reign and should have ended the matter; but unlike Qin’s incorporation of the Chinese ‘Midwest’ in Sichuan, the Han incorporation of its ‘Deep South’ dragged on.
Two more kings of Nanyue occupied the throne in Panyu before trouble broke out again. By then, from Chang’an the mighty Han Wudi, son and successor of Jingdi, was transforming Han’s patchwork dominion into a dynamic east-Asian empire. The much-fragmented ‘feudal’ kingdoms had been reduced to impotence and obliged to accept imperial appointees as their chancellors, or prime ministers. This innovation went down badly in Nanyue when it was introduced in 113 BC. No Nanyue king had as yet actually visited Chang’an to offer tribute; and when a pro-Han faction in Panyu persuaded the young king to do so, the country rose in revolt under its existing chancellor. Han envoys and supporters were massacred, an avenging force from Chang’an repelled.
The Han empire, which had just opened a grand salient into central Asia, was being humbled by ‘barbarians’ at its back door. Han Wudi could no longer trifle with the situation, and suasion having failed, only force remained. In 112 BC no less than four expeditions converged on Panyu by river and sea. The ‘General of the Towered Ships’ at the head of 20,000–30,000 men got there first. Joined by the ‘General Who Calms the Waves’, he stormed Panyu at night and, come dawn, the city surrendered. ‘Thus five generations, or ninety-three years after Zhao Tuo first became king of Southern Yue, the state was destroyed.’18 Sima Qian, then at work on his Shiji, felt nothing but satisfaction. There would be no more kings of Southern Yue, nor of Eastern Yue (in Fujian), which suffered a similar fate the following year. By the end of 111 BC all of mainland southern China plus the island of Hainan and the Red River valley of northern Vietnam were finally incorporated into the empire.
141 BC–AD 1
HAN AND HUN
AMONG FUGITIVES FROM HAN JUSTICE IN the second century BC there was a saying that, if all else failed, they could always go ‘Northward to the Xiongnu [or] Southward to the Yue’. Of these the first was generally preferred, the Mongolian steppe-land of the Xiongnu being more congenial than pestilential Southern Yue. But for the authorities in Chang’an, the problem was the same: permeable border zones, with unpredictable enemies beyond and fickle dependants within, were incompatible with a well-regulated empire. In the far north, as in the deep south, the frontier had taxed the resolve of Han Gaozu and his successors and would only be settled, after a fashion and at great cost, in the reign of Han Wudi.
Wudi succeeded Han Jingdi in 141 BC. Fifteen at the time, he was still on the throne when he died at the age of sixty-eight. One of the longest and most eventful reigns on record (141–87 BC) benefited greatly from continuity, then fell victim to it. Opinion of Wudi’s rule has always been divided. He was either ‘an outright autocrat’ who subverted the authority of his ministers to ‘direct the government in person’, and so become ‘perhaps the most famous of all Chinese emperors’; or he was a palace cipher, scarcely able to control his own household, who ‘took no part in the military campaigns for which his reign is famous’ and was so oblivious of their cost that his tenure was in fact ‘a calamity for China’.1 While the emperor busied himself with matters of ceremony and ritual and dabbled in the arts, state initiatives seem often, but not always, to have come from ministers, counsellors or generals; and once approved, their execution was entrusted to the same functionaries.
This was in accord with Confucian teaching. Emperors were not supposed to toil day and night over cartloads of bamboo documentation as the Qin First Emperor was said to have done, nor to take the field with troops and drinking companions like Han Gaozu. Setting an irresistible example of righteousness and humane conduct required Heaven’s Son to stand aloof, and with his authority unimpaired by legislative niceties and executive responsibilities, cultivate a state of impassivity.
The condition was known as wuwei, a Daoist term variously translated as ‘doing nothing’, ‘suspended animation’ or ‘surcease of action’. The sage ruler ‘does nothing (wuwei)’, says Laozi, ‘and there is nothing that is not brought to order’.2 This was possible because in an ideal world the moral example set by the emperor was thought to create an attractional effect, like a magnet. By it, society as a whole was automatically orientated on the path of righteousness, so eliminating the need for laws and punishments, and by the same force the ablest and most upright of subjects were drawn ineluctably into the emperor’s ambit of service. His Celestial Majesty might then ‘do nothing’ in the knowledge that, with such paragons at the helm, nothing would not be ‘brought to order’.
There was a danger, though: cynics might be tempted to judge the excellence or otherwise of the emperor by the calibre of his officials. Discovering and selecting men of unimpeachable distinction and ability was critical, and it could usefully be advanced by some intelligent recruitment. Time and again the records include edicts urging officials throughout the empire to seek out promising candidates for office and send them to Chang’an. The practice had started back in Zhou times but assumed much greater urgency under the Han as the administration grew in size and complexity. Han Wudi increased the frequency of these recruitment drives, while standardising the selection process by the introduction of a question-and-answer element. Qualification by examination, a cardinal feature of the later imperial bureaucracy, would follow. Even a questionnaire required a syllabus and a panel to mark the submissions. The panel was set up as an academy of scholars, of whom there were fifty in 136 BC, though the number soon increased; and the syllabus entailed these academicians selecting and interpreting a canon of suitable texts, initially five, all of them either favoured by Confucius (‘Book